An aim of modern medicine is to provide personalized or individualized treatment regimens. These are treatment regimens which take into account a patient's individual needs or risks. A particularly important risk is the presence of a cardiovascular complication, particularly an unrecognized cardiovascular complication or a prevalence for such cardiovascular complications. Cardiovascular complications, particularly heart diseases, are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the Western hemisphere. Cardiovascular complications can remain asymptomatic for long periods of time. Therefore, reliable differential diagnosis of the presence of a cardiovascular complication is more difficult and error-prone than generally believed.
Specifically, patients suffering from symptoms of an acute cardiovascular event (e.g., myocardial infarction) such as chest pain are currently subjected to a troponin T-based diagnosis. To this end, troponin T levels of the patients are determined. If the amount of troponin T in the blood is elevated, i.e., above 0.1 ng/ml, an acute cardiovascular event is assumed and the patent is treated accordingly.
However, by using the current troponin T test, a significant portion of patients is false positively diagnosed as suffering from an acute cardiovascular event. It is to be understood that the subsequent therapy is less effective or even ineffective, resulting in more severe complications or even death.
Therefore, there is a clear long-standing need for means and methods allowing for a precise differential diagnosis of acute cardiovascular events. The said means and methods shall allow a reliable and efficient differential diagnosis and shall avoid the drawbacks of the current techniques.
Thus, the technical problem underlying the present invention must be seen as the provision of means and methods for complying with the aforementioned needs.
The technical problem is solved by the embodiments characterized in the claims and herein below.